Ryan Grizzell, a 41-year-old Army veteran, is blowing a glass pipe, his blue eyes hidden behind protective eyewear as a soft, warm glow from a flame reflects on his face. Various glass rods are strewn about Shockers Smoke Shop, scattered among two kilns, a blowtorch, and a foot pedal. The small workstation sits by a window looking out on Harford Road; the smoke shop is nestled between an African hair-braiding salon and a business whose sign is hardly decipherable but reads something about garage-door services. The hands of the clock on the wall tick and change, but each of the 12 numbers is the same-4:20.

• The Horseshoe Casino, coming soon to Downtown Baltimore (1525 Russell St.), has started to reveal how it intends to feed its gambling hordes, and it involves some well-known food celebrities. Guy Fieri, of bleached blond hair and WTF catch-phrase...

BEST POLITICIAN
Martin O’Malley Love him or hate him, this has been a good year for Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley (D). Two O’Malley-backed laws got the nods of the majorities of Maryland voters in last fall’s elections—...

“Baltimore,” the song by Randy Newman from the 1970s, features a hooker, a drunk, and a refrain—“Man, it’s hard just to live”—that struck enough of a chord with the likes of Nils Lofgren, Nina Simone, David Gray,...

The Metro Gallery's tentative planned bar and stage renovations. The Metro Gallery, an arts and live music space in the Station North Arts District, plans to add a bar this spring thanks to its recently acquired liquor license. Noise sat down with Metro...

When local hip-hop band Soul Cannon played a release party for its new album at the Ottobar on Friday, it made a decision that could be interpreted as either really smart or really unwise: booking two opening bands that have fervent local followings and reputations as great live acts. Sure, the inclusion of Pittsburgh rap duo Grand Buffet and Tennessee transplants J-Roddy Walston and the Business helped pack the house for Soul Cannon's big night, but the headliner also ran the risk of being blown off...

This year, there was some new public art (for the benefit of those stuck in traffic on the I-395 Causeway) by Miami artists Jim Drain and Bhakti Baxter. "VIP Party" is a fake party in cargo containers at the Port of Miami, complete with searchlights and parked luxury cars. It's so exclusive, no one is there. Which is exactly the logic of everything this week; everyone wants to throw the biggest and best event; balancing a display of surplus with scarcity of access. It's really dumb. The weekend is always,...

Incumbent mayors run for re-election in Baltimore the same way they do everywhere else: by using friends' money and resources to try to make magic happen. And it usually works. William Donald Schaefer in the 1970s and '80s had an unstoppable electoral machine, and it propelled him to the governor's office in 1986. Kurt L. Schmoke's campaign committee was also legendary, getting him re-elected twice before he stepped down in 1999. Martin O'Malley claimed the open-seat mayoral race that year, using a lean,...

Restaurant and Catering Industry Photos

Now that Sheila Dixon is the duly elected mayor of Baltimore, the time is ripe to see how she pulled off her hands-down victory. The money raised and spent on her campaign between Jan. 18 and Oct. 24 is available online, and the question is: How best to analyze the data? Something that happened in the middle of the election season gave the Count an idea.
Political donors' addresses were taken off the state's online campaign-finance database briefly this summer. As one election official put it to the...

Jill P. Carter
Last August, Del. Jill Carter lent her campaign $10,000. Even with that temporary boost, the Committee for Jill P. Carter started this year's mayoral fundraising season with only $1,247.31 in the bank--hardly the kind of balance needed to fuel a citywide drive to replace well-funded incumbent Mayor Dixon. Carter's fundraising machine is in working order, though, having pulled in enough dough to back an easy re-election campaign last fall, when she was the top vote-getter among the three...

The Double T Diner in Catonsville is an odd place for the mayor of Baltimore to go for a breakfast meeting. Located about 10 miles west of City Hall on Baltimore National Pike, just outside the Beltway, the Double T is a large retro-styled restaurant serving diner food-the same schtick, albeit in a scaled-down space, can be had one block north of City Hall at the Hollywood Diner.
Yet at 7:30 a.m. on Monday, July 16, 2007, according to Mayor Sheila Dixon's official desk calendar, she was at the Double T,...

It's a bakery! It's a deli! It's a market! It's a bar! It's a restaurant!
It is the Parkside, the latest venue to open on the Hamilton-Lauraville stretch of Harford Road. Owners Vickie Johnson, Troy Zinderman, and former Brewer's Art brewer Chris Cashell and his wife, Colleen, have transformed the dicey Cameo Lounge (and prior to that, 1930s movie theatre, the Parkside) into a collection of food-centered businesses all under one roof.
The idea to have so many facets of the business came from both...